


The Peacock and the Sex Therapist

by katybar



Series: Touch and Touchability [2]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Asexual Spectrum, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, John not succeeding (much), John trying to help, M/M, ending is happier than it appears, possible past abuse (not graphic), sex therapy, unsure!sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 12:09:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8489005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katybar/pseuds/katybar
Summary: John could have sleepy, comfortable, middle-of-the-road, cuddly sex five nights out of seven without getting bored.  He is happy to burrow into Sherlock’s embrace, shelter against his solar plexus, curl up between his fingers. 
Sex for Sherlock is a more complicated thing, though.





	

It’s been two years and mostly John is happy and he thinks Sherlock is happy too. He remembers those years, all those five years before, of locking eyes with Sherlock over a dead body or Mrs. Hudson’s scorched kitchen table or other inappropriate place, the tidal pull towards the other man, the feeling of being washed away and pulled under and slowly lit around the edges all at once.  

It’s not like that any more.

Or maybe it was never like that, maybe his memories have filled in the spaces like a color-by-numbers.

Or maybe it was even more like that, and John has squeezed the sap out of the memories like pressing autumn leaves in his biochem textbook.

Now there are many nights where John is too tired or Sherlock is too pre-occupied for much more than a perfunctory cuddle before John falls asleep and Sherlock lays awake beside him.

And there are a few nights, mostly after a case, when sex flows and fizzes like champagne.

And there are nights, somewhere between a few and many, when they lob guarded glances at one another, and John reaches out, and Sherlock grumbles, and they slow dance around each other until something gives, and then usually there is sex and usually it is fine, all fine, but not transcendent.

It has John worried.

A bit.

John could have sleepy, comfortable, middle-of-the-road, cuddly sex five nights out of seven without getting bored.  He is happy to burrow into Sherlock’s embrace, shelter against his solar plexus, curl up between his fingers.

Sex for Sherlock is a more complicated thing, though.

There is a careful approach fraught with secret codes and passwords that change from week to week, monsters that roam and quicksands and shifting tides. There is nothingness. There are echoes of shouting, and insults that can interpreted in multiple ways.  There is (somedays) a tipping point, though it shifts continually in the shimmering landscape, and some days Sherlock is happy to tumble over it and other days he digs his heels and fingertips into the bare rock and pouts.

\---

It’s also been years since John has seen Ella, but her voice over the mobile connection is as calm and sure as always.  “John Watson,” she says “what can I do for you?”

He doesn’t ask for a joint appointment.  Even a therapist must have her limits, and he is not interested in witnessing Sherlock shred hers.  In any case, fitting Sherlock into her beige office would be like stuffing a peacock into a phone booth. No, he just makes an appointment for himself, on his lunch break, on what he hopes will be a quiet day.

It’s a breach of professional ethics, probably, but Ella has known him for years now, she's kept him alive long enough for Sherlock to take over the job more than once, and she smiles when they shake hands, as if his happiness and stability can be read from his fingernails or his haircut.

After a bit of wheedling, she agrees to explain the process to him, along with some wry warnings about the advisability of doing sex therapy without an actual therapist.  “Could be dangerous” notes John with a momentary grin, and she laughs as if it was a joke.

\---

That night John explains the experimental procedure to Sherlock – the timer, the pants-stay-on rule, the no-actual-sex rule, the way they are meant to communicate and use their words and tell each other what works, what feels good, what doesn’t.  Sherlock’s eyes light up at the word “experiment”, and John doesn’t object to either a laptop on the side table or a go-pro camera on Sherlock’s forehead. The camera band flattens Sherlock’s curls into a parody of an eighties aerobics instructor, so John closes his eyes.

Sherlock walks away, and John hears the faint sound of fiddling, which lasts long enough for John’s skin to raise goosebumps.  Apparently being in your pants in their big bed on a cool November evening is less comfortable when nothing is actually happening.  Just as John is starting to consider burrowing under the covers, Sherlock returns.  The right strap is  slipping repeatedly over his eye, and he looks flummoxed, and beyond that, unsure, quiet, and reserved.

“Should I—“ John starts, but Sherlock waves in one of his quick, undefinable gestures, rolling his eyes a bit as he does, and John stays where he is.  He had thought that going first would allow Sherlock to ease in and feel more comfortable, but he’s not sure now that he was right.

When Sherlock finally abandons the go-pro and starts the timer, his hands are cool and his touch mechanical.  He palpates John’s left shoulder until he finds a knot and bores down on it before John can figure out how to direct him.  After that it’s an awkward two-step, John couching his language in careful elliptical phrases and Sherlock lurching from one instruction to the next. 

Finally the timer buzzes and Sherlock drops his hands from where John had asked him to stroke lightly up and down the backs of his thighs.  A moment later, the hands return and stutter out a few more strokes, then disappear again.  Sherlock clears his throat, and John cranes his neck back at him with a smile that Sherlock doesn’t return.

Sherlock flops wordlessly on the bed next to him and John sets the timer and glances at the laptop.  There is a spreadsheet open, but nothing recorded.  John turns his attention back to Sherlock, starting with a heavy feathering that he knows Sherlock likes, then murmurs “tell me what you want, love.”  There is a silence nearly broken by the furrowing of Sherlock’s brow as he scowls into the mattress.  John considers stopping until Sherlock actually says something, but decides that that is against the spirit of the game, if not the letter of it.

John soldiers on, digging lightly into the muscles, back to feathering, then long smooth heavy strokes like a tidal pull, then rapping lightly with his knuckles, heavier with the curved tips of his fingers, then lifting the muscles away from bone and sinew, rattling them with both hands, then back to heavy pressure –

“Why would you do that?” it is sharp and not in the least elliptical, the first thing that Sherlock has said in 4 minutes and 38 seconds, according to the electronic timer, and if you don’t count the scowling. 

“I’m sorry – “ John begins.

“As a doctor, you know full well where the scapular crest is,” Sherlock continues. “I can only assume—“ but he cuts off suddenly and burrows his face farther into the sheets.

“Hey, it’s all right,” John’s using his talking-to-a-ten-year-old-with-a-wounded-dog voice, and it’s annoying even him.  “I thought—“

“Well, that’s new,” Sherlock mumbles into the pillowcase, and John swats him lightly on the arse.

“Just tell me what you want, yeah?” John assays, but Sherlock is stubbornly silent until the timer passes the 7 minute mark, when he says in a sudden rush, “I don’t like it, I never have done, I don’t know why you would think that I would, it just hurts to have someone push their thumb into the fragile edge of a shoulderblade, but then again doctors aren’t meant to be massage therapists I suppose,” and he lapses back into barbed silence.

John squints at his back in some disbelief, remembering at least one memorable occasion of guttural drawn-out moans and Sherlock’s head tipped almost perpendicular back on that long column of a neck and that bloody well had been the exact same spot and the exact same pressure, John knows because he tries now and then to replicate that night, but now he knows maybe not the why, but perhaps the fact that it won’t work again, not easily in any case.

The last three minutes pass less eventfully, with John rocking Sherlock in what he hopes is a soothing rhythm into the mattress.  When the timer goes off, he lets up gradually on the rocking, then stands up, puts his shirt back on, walks around the bed, pulls ineffectively at the covers, replaces the go-pro on the table, then walks back to where he started, gazing at Sherlock’s oblivious back. 

He climbs into bed next to Sherlock, pulls the covers over Sherlock, who hasn’t strirred since the end of the experiment, bowed in on himself like a trilobite.

“It was a shite idea,” he says by way of apology.

Sherlock starts to roll his eyes, stops, frowns instead.  Someday he’s going to sprain an eyeball doing that, but today he just says, surprisingly mildly, “it’s fine, John, it’s – it’s good,” a lie so blatant that John scoffs at him.

“Did you want to record anything on the spreadsheet?” he tries again.

“No,” Sherlock dismisses the query, then hunches further in on himself.  John is obscurely insulted by the gallantry.

“Not your type, am I?” he tries for light-hearted, hears his voice fall into the abyss, tries again less convincingly “am I?”

“Could be I prefer women,” Sherlock grates out.

“Could it?” John is skeptical to a point that doesn’t assuage the hemorrhaging behind his ribs.

“No,” Sherlock concedes. Then much more quietly, “could be I don’t prefer men.”

 John can’t quite prevent his sharp, tight hiss, loud in the silence of the flat, and Sherlock scrambles around, locates John’s hand, rubs it hard across his face, his forehead, lips, both cheeks, lips again, sucks three fingers into his mouth and pulls John by the crook of the elbow on top of him, splays John out over his shoulders and neck and ribs, rubs his face back and forth on the heel on John’s hand, sucks frenetically at John’s fingers.  The reaction is bizarre enough that John huffs a not-quite-laugh and lowers his forehead to Sherlock’s curls, just above his ear, nuzzles, whispers endearments, breathes warm until Sherlock relents and lets his pruned fingers go, murmurs “could be memories of other people too.  Could be a lot of things.”

John pulls his damp fingers along Sherlock’s jaw, pushes his t-shirt out of the way, and molds himself to Sherlock’s still-brittle back.  “Shhh,” he croons, and “I’ve got you,” and “I get it,” and Sherlock doesn’t call him out on any of it, even though there is nothing remotely to get in anything he said.  Instead his back relaxes in increments and John nuzzles at the soft skin in the curve of his neck, and Sherlock’s breath goes slowly even.

For once, it is Sherlock who falls asleep and John who lies awake beside him, wondering if it would be possible after all to fit a peacock into a sex therapist’s office.


End file.
